From December 6th – 9th, 2016, the Peacebuilding Evaluation Consortium, DME for Peace, and Everyday Peace Indicators with support from Search for Common Ground, George Mason University, Alliance for Peacebuilding, and funding by the Carnegie Corporation of New York hosted #BreakingBarriers in Cape Town to use human centered design principles to create solutions to barriers to participation & inclusion in evaluation

What is Co-Design?

Co-Design, is a participatory, human-centered, and action-oriented process of achieving design thinking. Design thinking is an approach to solving complex problems by identifying the key stakeholders and effectively designing an actionable solution based upon their input. Design thinking was established to move beyond the linear, problem-solution model, and to recognize the multiple variables that often contribute to effective problem solving. In peacebuilding, development, and humanitarian sectors, the problems we deal with are complex. We operate in challenging and ever changing contexts, with a variety of stakeholders, and creating a solution that addresses these areas requires adaptive, participatory, inclusive, all-encompassing, and creative problem solving.

How did we implement Co-Design in Cape Town?

Day One: An open conference where participants defined participation and inclusion, and the barriers to these ideals, in the context of peacebuilding evaluation.

Day Two: Journey Mapping & Ideation

Day Three: Feasibility/Effectiveness Mapping & Prototyping

Day Four: Concept Canvas Development

What solutions were generated?

Over the four days, participants had the opportunity to put forward their own ideas that would be further developed through the Co-Design workshop. These ideas were subject to voting from the entire group after the feasibility/effectiveness mapping portion of the workshop and from this, the final four ideas were identified. Each participant then had an opportunity to join an idea that they wished to work on for the remainder of the workshop and generate a concept canvas which was then presented to the entire group. You can view each of the concept canvases, here!

What's next?

This is a live discussion with the DME for Peace community! These concepts are still only that, concepts. Moving forward we will continue to facilitate discussions with our global community to turn these concepts into tangible solutions to participation & inclusion in peacebuilding evaluation!

Here is a recording of the recent M&E Thursday Talk by Rebecca Herrington of Search for Common Ground discussing the events in Cape Town and outlining the next steps in the Breaking Barriers process: